Mind the Gap

The biggest problem in Blair Buswell’s life over the past six months has been the gap in Michael Strahan’s teeth. For three decades, Buswell has been the chief sculptor of the busts given to players inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He has completed eighty-seven in all, including four of this year’s seven-man class (he limits himself to no more than a quartet each year, for quality’s sake; an assistant picks up the remainder), but until Strahan he had never dealt with a gap. “I presented a unique challenge, ’cause I told him I wanted to smile,” the former Giants defensive end and N.F.L. single-season sack leader, now known more broadly as a daytime-talk-show host, said recently. Strahan’s logic was simple: “If I close my mouth, people won’t know who it is.”

Buswell, who is fifty-seven, works from a studio in Salt Lake City. He wears rimless spectacles and has a covering of short white hair from crown to chin, as though Mrs. Claus had persuaded Santa to keep things neat this year. He played college football, at Brigham Young University. He was also a promising art student, so the team doctor designed a pair of special pads to protect his hands. They didn’t get much use: in one season, Buswell, a running back, carried the ball just once, for two yards.

Prior to Buswell’s hiring by the Hall, in 1983, the busts were molded by his predecessor, Jack Worthington, using photos and the player’s hat size. (Try getting Bronko Nagurski to sit with a plaster mask on his face.) But “ ‘seven and three-quarters’ doesn’t tell me much about a guy’s nose,” Buswell said last week. On the recommendation of Merlin Olsen, a lineman who greeted the unveiling of his bust, in 1982, with the question, “Who’s that?,” Buswell began insisting on in-person modelling sessions with each inductee. He meets his subjects at the Super Bowl, where he takes some initial measurements, then returns to his studio and begins shaping a clay model, referring occasionally to a board covered with photos of each player from different angles and at different ages. He then follows up with a private session, either in the player’s home or at the studio. This two-step process started after 1985, when he spent his lone meeting with O. J. Simpson adding more and more layers of clay to his model, having underestimated the size of Simpson’s head. During the modelling sessions, wives are often more critical than their husbands: when the former quarterback Steve Young’s wife saw his bust, she said that Buswell was being kind to her husband’s ears, to which Young protested, “It’s supposed to be a better you than you.”

Buswell lets players choose the likeness they prefer (young or old, bearded or clean-shaven), but he typically discourages them from smiling. “I give them disclosures, and one of them is that bronze teeth never look right,” he said, noting that the former Broncos quarterback John Elway complained, in 2004, that his teeth looked like Chiclets. But Strahan was insistent—“I want to be the smiling giant”—so the sculptor agreed. “I’ll do it,” Buswell said. “I’ll just say it’s not the most popular choice.”

And so, like everything else on his face—the bridge of his nose, the distance between his laugh lines, the width of his goatee—the gap between Strahan’s front teeth had to be measured. Strahan was happy to oblige: several years ago, a friend had made a bust of his head just from photos, and it hadn’t gone well. “It’s O.K.,” Strahan said of that earlier bust, before correcting himself (“It’s not bad”), then correcting himself again (“It’s in a trophy case far away from everybody”). In March, Buswell brought a clay model to the “Live with Kelly and Michael” studio, near Lincoln Center, and stuck a pair of calipers into Strahan’s mouth. Strahan sat for four hours while Buswell worked on perfecting the model. Strahan thought the session went long; Buswell said that he had taken half of the time he would have liked.

Buswell has made many concessions to his subjects (and their vanity) over the years. Eric Dickerson and Terry Bradshaw asked that their busts have fuller heads of hair. Warren Sapp wanted cornrows. Buswell had been excited to sculpt Larry Csonka, because of the sharp left turn his nose took after its many fractures, but Csonka had refused to pose until after he’d had corrective surgery. Among this year's inductees, Andre Reed decided to forgo the Jheri curl of his early days in favor of a later-career fade. The Hall has rules prohibiting players from adorning their busts with jewelry, eye black, or other accessories, a rule that Walter Jones, a member of this year’s class, who wore a nasal strip during part of his career, was happy to follow. “My mom said, ‘Thank God, ’cause I hated that thing on your nose,’ ” Jones said. Other players have been more upset by the rule: at last year’s induction, Deion Sanders got onstage and tied one of his signature headbands on Buswell’s bust.

The players get to watch Buswell work during the sessions, but they see the final result only at the ceremony. In between, Buswell takes the models back to his studio, where he makes final tweaks before putting the busts through the bronzing process and shipping them to Canton, Ohio, where on Saturday the players will unveil them on national television. “It better be a pleasant surprise,” Strahan said.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this piece misidentified the day that the busts would be unveiled.